To properly appreciate the infamous shower
scene (which regrettably spawned the entire mad-slasher genre)
you have to understand that Janet Leigh was *the* big name talent
that everyone believed was the star of the picture. I wish I
could have been there to experience the shock that went through
unsuspecting audiences when this movie first opened in 1960.
[more]

Last Thursday, I said the deadline
was upon us for deciding what to call the series of related tournaments
we're planning for Origins.
On Friday, Eeyore
posted a new suggestion to the Icehouse list: The Looney Labs
Big Experiment. "It's got that 'Alan Parsons Project' feel
to it," he wrote, "You can give out name tags that
say 'Test Subject' on them. (Actually, ear tags would be more
appropriate, but also more painful.)"

Well, congratulations Eeyore, you're the winner of our Name
The Event contest! (Oh, and thanks too for fixing the atom on
our signpost! We're so glad it came with a warranty!)

Actually, this decision was made democratically. Since the
in-house team was divided on what name to choose, I asked the
people on the Icehouse
mailing list to vote, and the Big Experiment was the clear
winner. It captured 42% of the vote, with Martian Interplanetary
Gaming Championships taking second place (26%), followed by the
LooneyLympics (19%) and variations on the Polyhedrothon/Pentahedrathon
idea (13%). So the Big Experiment it is!

So now we're quickly developing plans around this new theme.
I sketched out a logo, and Alison worked it up in Illustrator,
and tomorrow Kristin will place an order with our button manufacturer
for the "Test Subject" buttons we'll be giving to participants
of the Big Experiment. [Note to IceTourney
vets: if you want to try to get the same player number you had
in the old Icehouse Games days, get there early or make your
reservations in advance!] Plus, we're brainstorming new competitions
to include in the Big Experiment... we have in mind adding a
few on-going challenges in the booth that will reinforce the
notion that the con-goers are hordes of mice in a giant maze
and we're scientists controlling it all from the outside, rewarding
the best performers with pieces of cheese, or in this case, prizes.
Plus, this clinches it: we're getting lab coats to outfit our
team with.

In other news, we decided at the very last minute NOT to drop
the outer display box during the now-underway next printing of
Fluxx version
2.1. On Friday, we went up to Baltimore to meet with the sales
team at Alliance, the giant game distributorship, and it was
very instructive... we learned a lot about how best to coordinate
the release of our new game Chrononauts,
we saw that our soon-to-be-released Looney Games carrying bag
so cool we need to make it available to them for pitching to
stores, and, like I said, we learned that the fancy display cartoon
that ICE created to hold 6 Fluxx decks is more worthwhile than
we were giving it credit for. "The display box was the best
thing ICE did for Fluxx," one of the sales guys said. The
existence of a bulk pack makes it easier to get a store to buy
6 decks instead of 2 or 3, but more importantly, when the decks
are all gone, there's this empty box on the counter reminding
the store owner that a) Fluxx sells well, and b) they need to
re-order more of them. Without a display, a store owner can easily
forget to restock even a very popular item.

So, we're back to having the decks packed into 6 packs, but
over the weekend we hastily redesigned the appearance of the
existing box. ICE's colorful confetti design was cute, but we
wanted something that would say "under new management."
The new box will be black, with stars, and Keeper art floating
in space, not unlike the design of the new Fluxx
Zone T-shirt. Hopefully, we'll have new decks packed in these
new cartons by Origins, but the lateness of this decision has
us bracing ourselves for disappointment.

And now for the bad news: we're also contemplating a price
increase. Needless to say, we don't want to, but we were planning
to get rid of the display box because of its added expense, and
now, with that extra cost factored back in, it's looking like
we'll need to raise the price to $10. (So if you want to save
a buck, buy a deck now before we run out of the old version!)

And finally, we achieved another corporate milestone this
week: we now have a warehouse! It's just a unit in one of those
ubiquitous self-storage facilities, but hey, that's just what
we need: a place to store more stuff. We've been making do by
shoving boxes into every corner of the house, and in particular
the attic; a year ago, we put in a ladder and a floor, and the
added space allowed us to get by for quite awhile without getting
real warehouse space. But now, with over 2 tons of Fluxx
decks on order, we have to start preparing a bigger facility,
hence the chamber at the local U-Store-type place. (OK, so it's
not very exciting, but hey, that's what's going on here this
week!)

Remember
Peter McWilliams!

Best-selling author, cancer/AIDS patient, and
medical-marijuana advocate Peter McWilliams has died. Awaiting
sentencing for the medical use of marijuana in a state where
it's supposed to be legal, after a trial he lost because he was
forbidden to explain how marijuana singularly helped his severe
medical conditions, he had no choice but to stop using a vital
medication that was helping him stay alive. He was forced into
this by *daily* urine testing, any failure of which would not
just send him back to jail, but would also allow the government
to confiscate his mother's house. With nothing to effectively
quell his intense nausea, he died, by choking on his own vomit.
If this story
doesn't make you question what our government is doing in this
War on Drug Users, you have no soul.

"He was murdered by the United States Government
as surely as if they shot him. If an individual did what the
federal government did to Peter McWilliams, deliberately deprive
him of medicine that would save his life, that person would be
indicted for murder. And this was murder. Moreover, it was premeditated,
and a part of a pattern of the criminal abuse of power. Consider
the evidence." - Richard Cowan

"The Federal prosecutor personally called
my mother to tell her that if I was found with even a trace of
medical marijuana, her house would be taken away." - Peter McWilliams